The Moscow Club

by Finder, Joseph

  The door opened, and the small elderly woman peered out. “Yes?” she inquired.

  She was even frailer than the couple had expected.

  “Irene?” the younger woman asked, smiling gently, her eyes wide.

  “Yes?” Suspicious now, the old woman tightened her small fingers around the grip of the aluminum walker.

  “Irene, I’m Helen Stevens, and this is Bob. We’re volunteers with County Social and Family Services.” The dark-haired woman smiled again, almost apologetically, and added, “Ruth Bower gave us your name.” Ruth Bower, the couple had been instructed, was the name of a neighbor of the old woman’s who came by from time to time to help out around the house.

  The old woman’s cloudy, puzzled eyes relaxed now. “Oh, come in.”

  The younger woman chattered as she and her husband entered. “I don’t know if Ruth mentioned that the agency sends us to help people do little things—shop, move boxes, whatever you need.” She closed the door behind them.

  The woman whose name was Anna Zinoyeva made her way slowly to the plastic-covered brown-tweed sofa in the small front room. “Oh, thank you very much,” she said.

  “Irene, listen,” the man said, speaking for the first time, taking

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  a seat next to the couch in a plastic-covered chair. “Did you meet with someone earher today? It’s very, very important that we know.” He watched her expression, watching for a telltale flicker of fear, admission.

  “Nobody,” Anna Zinoyeva said, biting her lip.

  Yes. She had spoken to somebody.

  “What did he want from you?” the wife asked.

  “I never saw anyone,” the old woman protested, terrified now. “Please. No. I never saw—”

  The young woman continued now, switching to Russian, using the old woman’s real name.

  “No,” Anna Zinoyeva gasped. Again! They had come for her again! For a moment, she did not believe her ears. They knew her name, a name that, until this morning, had not been spoken in decades.

  “Please leave me alone,” she said, whimpering. Her body shook violently. She could not contain her terror. “What do you want to know from me? Please, what do you want to know?”

  “All we want to know,” the man said in a gentle, singsong voice, “is what the man asked you.”

  The old woman finally talked.

  The young woman turned the old woman’s body over, pulling the house dress up as far as the thigh, and made a deep incision with a knife. Moments earlier, they had broken her fragile neck, but the arterial blood still spurted upward, then slowed to a steady red flow. She waited until the flow had stopped, which did not take long.

  “Ready,” she said.

  Her husband had donned surgical gloves. He removed a round glass vial and a long swab from the case he had brought.

  “Is that dangerous?” she asked, indicating the liquid he was plunging, repeatedly, into the incision.

  “I wouldn’t touch it,” he said. “Clostridium welchii. It’s terrible stuff, but it does the job.”

  The organism hastened natural decomposition. When the body was discovered, it would appear that the old lady had died weeks ago:

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  perhaps slipped and fell, hit her head. Such things can happen to old people who live alone.

  If the couple had had the time, they could have waited around to watch it work. In a matter of days, there would be nothing left of the body except the skeleton and a few tendons and a pile of mush, nothing left to identify. Nothing at all except a heap of bubbling tissue.

  The man removed the swab from the wound and stood up. “There,” he said.

  Stone drove up the blacktopped driveway of his father’s house, glancing warily from side to side with such subtlety that his father, sitting beside him in the front seat, did not seem to notice. But no one was here, it seemed. He got out and carried his suitcase and his father’s small overnight bag up to the front door. Alfred Stone walked gingerly alongside.

  Charlie switched off the house alarm with one key, then opened the front door with two others. The house was dark, the heavy furniture gleaming and lemon-smelling, the Persian rugs vacuumed, their fringes perfectly straight.

  “Well,” Alfred Stone announced. “I trust there are sheets on your bed upstairs.”

  “Can you get up the stairs all right?” Charlie asked.

  “I’m a lot stronger than I look.”

  “Let me carry your suitcase to your room; then I’ll go next door and get the dog. You’ll probably want to go to bed early.”

  He took both bags up the stairs, and a few minutes later he heard his father’s voice calling.

  “Charlie?”

  Stone set down the bag in his father’s room and walked quickly to the top of the stairs. “Yes?”

  He looked down and saw his father holding in one hand Saul Ansbach’s envelope, which Stone had left in the pocket of his overcoat. In his father’s other hand was the eight-by-ten glossy photograph.

  Charlie could feel his pulse quicken.

  “I was hanging up your coat,” Alfred Stone said. “This fell out.”

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  His eyes were wide, and the blood, quite literally, had drained from his face. “How did you get this? Why?”

  A few miles to the south, in the seedy part of Boston known as the Combat Zone, the several-block-wide area that is home to pornographic movie houses, sexual-aid shops, prostitution, and drugs, a man in a black leather jacket was sitting in a darkened movie theater watching a bosomy blonde fellate an especially well-endowed black man. It was early evening, and the theater was uncrowded: perhaps twenty viewers, who sat as far apart from one another as possible. A few old men masturbated openly.

  “Dobriy vecher.”

  Another man now sat beside the man in the leather jacket. This one was bearded and wore a dark-blue windbreaker.

  “Dobriy vecher, tovarishch,” the man in the leather jacket replied. Good evening, comrade.

  The two Russian emigres sat in silence for a moment, until both were satisfied they were unnoticed. The man in the leather jacket left the theater, followed a few minutes later by the other man.

  “It’s the woman you met with, isn’t it?” Charlie asked. “Sonya Kunetskaya.”

  His father looked shaken. “Yes.”

  “Is she alive?”

  Alfred Stone shrugged as if he didn’t care, but his eyes indicated otherwise.

  “What do you really know about her?” Stone asked impassionedly. “Could she have been a link to someone, an agent, in Russia that Lehman was controlling?”

  “Why are you asking me these things, Charlie?”

  “We shouldn’t talk now. I’m sorry. You’re tired; you should go to sleep. It can wait a few days.”

  “No, Charlie. I think we should talk now. I want to know what you’ve been finding out.”

  “Please, let’s talk another time.”

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  “Now, Charlie,” Alfred Stone demanded.

  Gently, Stone told his father some of what he had learned, from Saul’s allegations to the tale told by the old woman in New Jersey. He softened the story, leaving out Saul’s murder; it would not do to shock his father now.

  Alfred Stone listened, his mouth slighdy agape. “Keep going,” he said. “There are things I have to tell you, too.”

  A white van proceeded up Washington Street, out of the Combat Zone, toward Cambridge. The two men sat inside, the bearded man at the wheel. In the back seat was another, a large man with unfash-ionably long sideburns who had come up from Baltimore.

  The van was a 1985 Dodge, specially adapted by an expert craftsman in Pennsylvania who had served a ten-year jail term for participating in an armed robbery. He had thought he was adapting the van for ordinary criminals, but he knew enough to be discreet: his livelihood, as well as his life, depended upon it. He had constructed a veritable tank. Steel plates had been
welded to the inside, with a pulldown steel visor to protect the driver from gunfire, with slits at eye level. There were holes for gun ports. The van could withstand virtually any gunfire. It would take nothing short of a bazooka to interfere with its progress.

  The van was equipped with several .44-caliber magnum handguns and a number of Thompson submachine guns. But the two men did not expect to use any firepower at all on this mission. The assignment would be, as the Americans said, a piece of cake.

  The man at the wheel was a part-time taxi driver, as so many Russian emigres seemed to be. He had lived in Boston for three years, having been selected for the ultrasecret organization six months before he left Moscow. He lived alone in an impoverished Boston suburb and kept to himself, just another anonymous emigre in a cit' full of them. In reality, he, like the man in the leather jacket, whom he did not know, had been sent to this country and supported handsomely because they were men of unusual talents, men who could follow orders perfecdy and kill efficiently if required.

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  Thev drove up Massachusetts Avenue, through Hanard Square, and then found the street off Brattle.

  “Ne plokho,” the man in the leather jacket said admiringly of the large residential houses on Milliard Street. Not bad at all.

  “But ho would I know about things like covert operations?” Alfred Stone protested later, after Charlie had retrieved Pear-, and father and son were sitting at the kitchen table. “I was never involved in such things.” He moved the salt and pepper shakers around the Formica kitchen table, making ellipses around a glass of water and a brown plastic pharmacist’s pill bottle, as if they were all chess pieces.

  “You were Lehman’s assistant. You were the assistant to Truman’s national-securit}- adviser.”

  “Oh, God. We were inoled in things like Inchon, the troubles with MacArthur, and the Chinese communists. The recapture of Seoul. That kind of thing.”

  “You never heard anything about an attempt to pull off a coup in Moscow?”

  “A coup?” Alfred Stone laughed. “John Foster Dulles’s fondest wish. The enemy you know is better than the one you don’t. Hamlet, I think: ‘Rather bear those ills we hae than fl' to others that we know-not of.’ “

  “You heard nothing about a coup? Nothing? Not gossip, not passing references in documents?”

  “I’m not saying it wasn’t attempted.” He twisted open the pill bottle and shook an Inderal into his palm. Then he put it in his mouth and washed it down with a long draught of tap water.

  “Yes, I know,” Charlie said. “We—the U.S., I mean—tried a couple of times to hae Stalin knocked off. Tried to work on getting rid of Khrushchev after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Sure.”

  “Charlie,” his father said exasperatedly, “if you’re claiming that Winthrop Lehman, a fixture in the White House since the Rooseelt administration, was secretly involved in a coup against Stalin, I must say I wouldn’t be surprised in the least. I don’t even see anything w rong with it—Stalin was a dangerous tyrant; ever-one knew that.”

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  “Exactly,” Charlie said. “What’s wrong with a plot to unseat one of the twentieth century’s two greatest dictators?”

  “Right.”

  “If that’s all it was. But that can’t be the full story.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’d be no need to cover up such an operation. There’d be no reason to. For one thing, most of the principals would be dead.”

  “So what are you suggesting?”

  “I’m suggesting that something is alive today, something so serious and so secret that people’s lives can be extinguished simply for knowing a tiny piece of the puzzle.” He stared straight ahead for a moment, wondering how much to tell his father. “Now I need to know something from you. You’ve said you went to Moscow because Lehman asked you to go. But what else is there? Why did you really go? There’s more to it, isn’t there?”

  Alfred Stone sat silently at the kitchen table, his fingers moving oddly back and forth on the Formica as if by their own volition. He did not speak.

  “Why did you ruin your life for Winthrop Lehman?”

  His father gave an odd smile.

  “We all have our secrets, Charlie. I want you to do me a favor. You’re investigating all this for me. I can’t tell you what that means to me.” His eyes shone with something Charlie took to be gratitude. “But now I want you to stop.”

  “I can’t.”

  “The game isn’t worth the candle.”

  “It’s not a game.”

  “No, damn it. It’s not a game. But why do you persist? Why are you doing this?”

  “Initially, because I was assigned to. I was asked to find out about the Lenin Testament. I can’t really tell you why.”

  “Well, there’s someone you can talk to, if you insist on pursuing this. One of my former students might be able to help you. If anyone would know, he would—and if you needed an ally, he’d be there for

  you. He’s on the National Security Council—he’s got roughly the same job I had.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Former students, even those who’ve grasped their way to the top the way he has, tend to enjoy doing favors for their old mentors. Massages their egos.” He folded his fingers into a tent, interlaced them, then bent them backward unhl a few of the knuckles cracked. Suddenly he said, “Charlie, let’s go to Maine this weekend. I don’t think it will be too much for me, and I could use a chance to convalesce somewhere pleasant.”

  “Maine?” His father meant the lodge in southern Maine they used to take for a month every summer, during most of the years of his boyhood. The place—“lodge” was almost too grand a word for the rambling old farmhouse—had been one of Charlie’s favorite places. He remembered the smell of burning wood that permeated all the blankets in the house. The two of them would have long, lazy chats. They’d go out fishing, or duck-hunting. In the afternoons, Charlie would take the outboard motorboat and circle the lake, bombing over the water, while his father snoozed in a hammock. Sometimes Charlie would go out climbing, solo, on the nearby range. During the year, his father tended to be uncommunicative; at the lodge, he unwound.

  “I’d love to,” Charlie said. “You have something to tell me.”

  “Yes.”

  “About all this?”

  “Right.”

  “Don’t hold back—”

  “I won’t. Just give me a few days. I’ve held out for years; I can hold out another few days.”

  “A hint, then.”

  “Just that it involves me and you. The past. I’ll tell you everything. Charlie, you know about the fox and the hounds, right?”

  “Another metaphor?”

  “Haven’t I told you that one before? The hounds run for their lunch, but the fox runs for his life. Right now you’re a hound. Don’t become a fox. Will you do that for me?”

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  “I can’t, Dad.”

  “You can. Don’t be a fox. You’e got information now; you can threaten to use it, if need be. For me, Charlie. Give it up for me, all right? You’ll see why.”

  Charlie was silent for five seconds, ten, twenty. He sighed. “I hate to do it,” he said slowly. “But I will.”

  “Thank you. Now, I do need your help. Help me find that damned dog.” He walked to the kitchen door that gave onto the yard and opened it. Craning his neck, he called to Peary. “He likes staying outside at night. It’s curious. Most dogs prefer it inside.”

  The two men, father and son, stood at the back door. “What I was doing,” Charlie said at length, “I did for you.”

  Peary came up to the back door, his collar jingling musically.

  “I know,” Alfred Stone said as he massaged the dog’s ears. “It— don’t make me—” He fought back tears, bowing his head, obviously ashamed. After a minute, he could speak again. “I appreciate it.”

  At one-fifteen, the Russian in the lea
ther jacket, who had been walking down Hilliard Street at ten-minute intervals, saw that all the lights in Alfred Stone’s house had been extinguished.

  “Speshi,” he told his comrade, returning to the armored van. ‘Tom/’ Hurr'; it’s time.

  The bearded one went to the back of the van and located a shoulder bag that contained, among other tools, a pair of heavy-gauge wire-cutters, heavy black leather gloves, and a glass-cutter. They made their way around to the back of the house with the determined stride of two Cambridge residents returning home from a dinner part}’.

  The power box was exactly where they were told it would be, at the side of the house. The bearded man, wearing the rubber gloves, loosened three bolts and was then able to pull out the power cable, thereby shutting off the electricit)’ in the house. With the wire-cutters he severed the telephone cable.

  At the same time, his comrade had tried the kitchen window and found it locked. He affixed a suction cup to the glass and, with the glass-cutter, scored a large circle. Then he rapped it quickly but quietly,

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  which loosened the circle; the suction cup kept the glass from shattering on the kitchen floor. He reached his hand in, unlocked the window from the inside, and slid it open.

  Within three minutes, the two men were, almost noiselessly, inside the house.

  Stone slept uneasily. He had uncovered too much simply to give it up; there were too many unanswered questions.

  He lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling, tracing with his eyes the web of cracks he had watched for so many nights as a child. Suddenly he heard a soft, muffled thump. Downstairs? Someone passing by outside the house? At night one’s ears were easily deceived. A shutter closing?

  Then, inside, Peary started barking, which was strange, because he almost never barked at night.

  Stone turned in bed to glance at his digital clock. For a moment he thought it wasn’t there; then he realized that it was on the table, but it was dark. Could he have accidentally unplugged it? He sat up, and reached over to switch on the lamp. Dead. The power must have gone off.